‘Learning to eat mindfully changed my life’

I began my adult education studying for a psychology degree, and afterwards, trained to be a midwife.

I was a midwife for 15 years and I loved working with and caring for women, but I always had a fairly troubled relationship with food.

From secondary school age, I ‘felt fat’ and like I didn’t fit in. My mother was a serial dieter and I learned that certain foods were ‘bad’ and so was I if I ate them.

My weight and size fluctuated whilst I grew up and I had low self-esteem. I would diet and lose weight and then would go back to my old eating behaviours and put it all back on again. I felt like a failure every time.

I honestly hated myself and was sure that if only I could lose weight then everything would be fine. I would fit in, feel happy, get a boyfriend.

I never felt happy with my body whatever my weight. Even when I was thin. At the time, I didn’t realise I was thin and my experience of life was no different. Still self-conscious, still unhappy about my body, still something missing, but I didn’t know what.

I stopped dieting years ago, when, during one particular diet where you couldn’t eat chocolate (or something similar), I was ‘climbing the walls’. I had to eat the thing I wasn’t supposed to eat, I just had to.

The diet was over and I had a typical rebound reaction, where you eat as much of the forbidden food as you can.

This is called ‘the abstinence violation effect’. Now I understand my overeating behaviour was about managing stress and anxiety. I overate because that was how I coped with unwanted emotions and it helped, at least initially, until the guilt set in.

One day, about two years ago, I was scrolling through Facebook and I saw a post that mentioned ‘mindful eating’.

The post asked:

Do you love to eat, but have trouble stopping?

Do you feel guilty when you eat particular foods?

Do you feel out of control around some food?

This was exactly how I felt. And I realised, other people felt the same. This was a revelation.

Mindful eating takes the focus off weight loss, because counter-intuitively, trying to lose weight causes a disordered relationship with food. It helps you re-learn how to listen to your body as your guide to what to eat and when to stop.

So much of what we do with food is on autopilot. We eat because it’s lunchtime or in case we get hungry later. We forget to focus on what we are eating.

Mindful eating helps you reconnect with all of this and is so liberating because when you get the hang of it you realise you can do this yourself. You don’t need to diet or cut out food groups to ‘get healthy’.

Learning to eat mindfully is the healthiest thing I’ve ever done. It’s stopped my brain chatter around food and has freed up space for me to work out what I want to do in life.

Lisa Beasley is now a mindful eating coach.

Read more about her story and her work at www.mybodypositive.co.uk